Not many people have done more to explain comics’ appeal, and to push them as a creative form, than Scott McCloud. His 1993 book Understanding Comics is a wonderful introduction to the medium, mixing critical theory with playful drawings and taking the reader from hieroglyphics, Hogarth and stained-glass windows into superhero comics and the then novel concept of the “graphic novel”.

McCloud has published fiction, such as his exuberant but thoughtful early work Zot!, which pushed against the late-80s fashion for dark heroes and mixed romance with intergalactic drama. His pioneering work in web comics includes pieces reimagining the comic as diagram, with different narratives branching off in different directions, and a tale of love and statistics in which each panel is embedded in its predecessor and accessed via an immersive zoom. This focus on form, combined with his work lecturing and campaigning for creator rights, can obscure his abilities as a storyteller. And so an intriguing spotlight shines on The Sculptor, five years in the making and McCloud’s first graphic novel in a decade. Can the man’s who’s done so much for the comics canon write a work that leaps right into it?

Certainly, this 500-page hardback arrives with an almighty thump. It shares numerous themes – love, the clash of art and commerce and the nature of art itself – with his other work, and at its heart is an artist with a difference.

Young New Yorker David Smith was plucked from obscurity by a collector while still studying. It didn’t work out and, frustrated that his career as a sculptor never took off, and that his youth and tragic background (his family died when he was young) became branding tools, Smith is at rock bottom when two strange meetings shape his future.

First, Death, in the form of his deceased great uncle, joins the drunk David in a diner and offers him a deal: if he is prepared to live for only 200 more days, he can shape whatever he wants with his hands. Then, on his way home, the crowd parts and an angel drops from the sky, kisses him and leaves in a blizzard of birds.

Such improbable interventions are the meat and drink of mainstream comics, but McCloud is a more restrained storyteller than that. The desperate Smith enters into this Faustian pact, but rather than using his new power to trap villains in cement or burrow into a mysterious underworld, he shuts himself away and pulls his fingers through stone blocks, making strange autobiographical art. And while the angel does herald a world of wonder, it isn’t a supernatural one: the second encounter turns out to be an elaborate performance piece, the angel a beautiful, troubled jobbing actor called Meg whom David promptly falls for.

The self-absorbed David is not the most sympathetic of heroes, and for all his rigorous attachment to art for art’s sake (“It’s exactly that simple, either you compromise your principles or you don’t”), many of his creations are decidedly corny – the kind of flamboyant pieces that are lapped up by people with plenty of money and not much sense.

Thankfully, McCloud has a subtler touch, setting out his story in appealingly muted blues and blacks. The city is a big part of the narrative, and he renders its streets and buildings in gripping detail, working its life into his panels in fine style. The incidental speech bubbles of passing pedestrians crowd around David on a busy sidewalk, while elsewhere McCloud zeroes in on coffee cups, shopfronts, family gatherings, hipster galleries, the stark angles of skyscrapers and the white lines of parking lots. It’s a democratic vision, and McCloud’s technique of switching between fragments, letting the reader build a picture, works increasingly well as David and Meg’s difficult romance blossoms, his new campaign to put art at the city’s heart attracts police attention, and his calendar flicks on towards doomsday.

McCloud’s careful use of the fantastic keeps the focus on human emotions and problems: depression, frustrated ambition and young love. The Sculptor is less about the marvels of power than about the walls we build between us, and what happens when we let them fall. Some of the drawings – the sidewalk transformed into a calendar that drops into the abyss, a falling body frozen above the concrete – are wonderfully affecting, and The Sculptor develops into a graphic novel big enough to pull all manner of ideas and emotions to its heart. This inventive and touching love story is compelling proof that McCloud can walk the walk as well as talking the talk.